Right... because people watch Star Trek (or Star Wars or Firefly or Battlestar Galactica) because they're looking for hard science. People watch it because they like the setting, characters and stories. People like to watch stories set in the future (or a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away) in the same way they do ones set in Victorian England or the medieval period. Sure, there are those demand hard science, but just because Star Trek doesn't follow it is no reason for a "self-respecting geek" to hate it.

No "Gentlemen, this computer has an auditory sensor. It can, in effect, hear sounds. By installing a booster, we can increase that capability on the order of one to the fourth power. The computer should bring us every sound occurring on the ship. " ?

The Bad Astronomer:And thanks for the submission, Subby, but the article is actually more about why I love Trek. :) I really do

D'oh, I knew I should have been patient - due, the Pulaski thing was just shiatty writing. Granted, other episodes make mention/use of a function that filters out pathogens or disables weapons, but I believe Unnatural Selection was the only episode that used the transporter to change characters on a fundamental level.

Atop the list should be "That nerds invented a holodeck and then found the time and motivation to invent other things instead of living in said holodeck having continuous sex with a platoon each of Catwomen from Newmar through Hathaway until their death from terminal glans abrasion."

Solon Isonomia:The Bad Astronomer: And thanks for the submission, Subby, but the article is actually more about why I love Trek. :) I really do

D'oh, I knew I should have been patient - due, the Pulaski thing was just shiatty writing. Granted, other episodes make mention/use of a function that filters out pathogens or disables weapons, but I believe Unnatural Selection was the only episode that used the transporter to change characters on a fundamental level.

Best ever use of the transporter was when Troi was transported minus her clothing. If ever there were an episode that needed to be on HBO or Showtime...

The biggest mistake in the reboot is that the transporter was able to teleport people onto a moving starship at warp and at across great distances. Say like beaming from Saturn to Earth in the case of the end of that reboot. This revelation instantly makes starship travel obsolete.

Worse the transporter also shows they can remotely manipulate objects on a quantum level. In no way is the transporter a 1 shot fire all the atomic goo signal at the target location and it assembles itself correctly. This goes to ask why they didn't just lock onto the red matter and transporter it into an unstable state. Also why didn't they just transport the core of one of those torpedos on Nero's ship outside of its casing?

And even better yet, if the transporter is all that great then why does the scanner technology suck to the point where they can't tell if a room is a cargo bay or not from 6 billion miles off?

Sliding Carp:No "Gentlemen, this computer has an auditory sensor. It can, in effect, hear sounds. By installing a booster, we can increase that capability on the order of one to the fourth power. The computer should bring us every sound occurring on the ship. " ?

theresnothinglft:The biggest mistake in the reboot is that the transporter was able to teleport people onto a moving starship at warp and at across great distances. Say like beaming from Saturn to Earth in the case of the end of that reboot. This revelation instantly makes starship travel obsolete.

Worse the transporter also shows they can remotely manipulate objects on a quantum level. In no way is the transporter a 1 shot fire all the atomic goo signal at the target location and it assembles itself correctly. This goes to ask why they didn't just lock onto the red matter and transporter it into an unstable state. Also why didn't they just transport the core of one of those torpedos on Nero's ship outside of its casing?

And even better yet, if the transporter is all that great then why does the scanner technology suck to the point where they can't tell if a room is a cargo bay or not from 6 billion miles off?

BafflerMeal:theresnothinglft: The biggest mistake in the reboot is that the transporter was able to teleport people onto a moving starship at warp and at across great distances. Say like beaming from Saturn to Earth in the case of the end of that reboot. This revelation instantly makes starship travel obsolete.

Worse the transporter also shows they can remotely manipulate objects on a quantum level. In no way is the transporter a 1 shot fire all the atomic goo signal at the target location and it assembles itself correctly. This goes to ask why they didn't just lock onto the red matter and transporter it into an unstable state. Also why didn't they just transport the core of one of those torpedos on Nero's ship outside of its casing?

And even better yet, if the transporter is all that great then why does the scanner technology suck to the point where they can't tell if a room is a cargo bay or not from 6 billion miles off?

BafflerMeal:theresnothinglft: The biggest mistake in the reboot is that the transporter was able to teleport people onto a moving starship at warp and at across great distances. Say like beaming from Saturn to Earth in the case of the end of that reboot. This revelation instantly makes starship travel obsolete.

Worse the transporter also shows they can remotely manipulate objects on a quantum level. In no way is the transporter a 1 shot fire all the atomic goo signal at the target location and it assembles itself correctly. This goes to ask why they didn't just lock onto the red matter and transporter it into an unstable state. Also why didn't they just transport the core of one of those torpedos on Nero's ship outside of its casing?

And even better yet, if the transporter is all that great then why does the scanner technology suck to the point where they can't tell if a room is a cargo bay or not from 6 billion miles off?

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Also, is that transporter signal also travelling at warp? And how fast are the sensors? are they warp driven sensors or are they light speed?

Majick Thise:Solon Isonomia: Unnatural Selection was the only episode that used the transporter to change characters on a fundamental level.

In TOS 'The Enemy Within' they took 2 James T Kirks stuck them both in the transporter and combined them to make one James T Kirk.

kkinnison: Science fiction, is fiction

Not forever...

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Except cell phones require infrastructure; communicators didn't.

And Tablets were so low-cost and commonplace (yet low in memory) in Trek that you would apparently have only one per file, and just pass them around rather than emailing your data; iPads still costs hundreds of dollars and you people don't tend to simply give them away.

Also, having watched Deep Space Nine and Voyager, and now watching The Next Generation, I can honestly say Star Trek is a bunch of crap. But at least now I understand some of the references my friends are constantly making.

RexTalionis:ManateeGag: DamnYankees: The list begins and ends with Threshold.which one was that?Tom Paris and Janeway go beyond Warp 10 and they turn into gigantic newts and have sex with each other.

I love Star Trek and I'm somewhat geekish on knowing the minutae, but I still don't understand subspace and how it works. Here's my thing.Doesn't stuff in subspace travel close to Warp 10, if not seemingly faster than Warp 10? Or does it travel at Warp 10? How else could you get dozens of ships located hundreds of light years apart to all be at one spot due to a Borg invasion? The news would still take months, yet everyone gets the message from Starfleet HQ or Starbase 25 in like two seconds. That would only work if you're travelling at a ridculously high speed like Warp 10 or something close to it.Or is it just explainable in technobabble?Now fluidic space in Voyager...that's another weird thing.

aerojockey:My favorite is whenever people from Star Trek get upset that with all their technology they still haven't solved Fermat's Last Theorem.

That episode was made before Andrew Wiles actually solved Fermat's Last Theorem. And I think that the writers of ST:TNG would even want to delve into higher-level mathematics like Galois transformations, eliptical functions, or the Taniyama conjecture, let alone any other kind of mathematics that might even have remotely been useful.

theresnothinglft:This goes to ask why they didn't just lock onto the red matter and transporter it into an unstable state. Also why didn't they just transport the core of one of those torpedos on Nero's ship outside of its casing?

My best guess is that if it's anything like antimatter, it would have to be transported in small amounts and in specially designed canisters or things go definitely bad. But it's Star Trek, so anything goes?

The fundamental mistake here is putting "science" in the same sentence with "Star Trek." There is no science in Star Trek; it's fantasy with the magic horses and swords and wizards replaced by magic space ships and phasers and Vulcans. Accept that, drink heavily enough to forget the ever-inconsistent application of technobabble solutions, stay well clear of the festering heap of Voyager, and enjoy the rest.